What Happened Today: Feb 10, 2022
Stock ban for Congress; unmanned helicopters; Facebook vs. Europe
The Big Story
In a sharp turn from her previous stance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the press yesterday that she’s now in support of new legislation that would prevent members of Congress from trading stocks. Previously, Pelosi balked at the idea, arguing that lawmakers should be free to participate in a “free-market economy” as long as they abide by current rules prohibiting them from making trades influenced by the confidential information passed along to them by intelligence agencies and defense officials on a routine basis. The extent to which legislators adhere to what amounts to an honor code has come under increased scrutiny during the coronavirus pandemic, in part because of several stock-trading scandals, including the significant unloading of certain stocks by Sen. Richard Burr and other members of Congress following confidential committee briefings on developments of COVID-19 before information had been made public. Later reporting revealed that legislators avoided losses of at least hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling stocks in hotel chains and other corporations impacted by the pandemic—well-timed transactions that ethics investigators found afterward to be within the bounds of existing rules on trading.
“Members of Congress see a lot of information that the general public doesn’t have access to. It’s not right for individuals to be elected to Congress and then be able to trade on that information that the American people do not have,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly said this week in support of the new rule, which is expected to come up for a vote before the midterm elections. Pelosi’s endorsement for the bill to include not only Congress but judges and other members of government is most likely an effort to avoid being perceived as a small minority against a measure that has backing from a growing number of lawmakers in both parties as well as the public, with 76% of voters in a recent survey saying they believed legislators had an “unfair advantage” in the stock market. Still, high-volume traders like Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville are critical of the legislation, arguing that if lawmakers can’t trade stocks, then talented candidates will be less inclined to pursue public office. “It’s ridiculous. They might as well start sending robots up here,” Tuberville said. “I think it would really cut back on the amount of people that would want to come up here and serve.”
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/09/congress-moves-towards-banning-members-from-trading-stocks.html
→ Sunday’s Super Bowl isn’t just a competition for the NFL championship between the L.A. Rams and Cincinnati Bengals; it’s an opportunity for a great deal of money to exchange hands between the 31.5 million people betting some $7.6 billion on the game, according to a new estimate by the American Gaming Association. That gigantic betting pool and number of betting participants is the result of new sports-betting laws all across the country, with now 30 states (along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico) legalizing the practice. Some opponents of the deregulation of sports betting fear the pernicious increase in gambling addiction, with 2% of the population now classified as gambling addicts by the National Council on Problem Gambling, a number the council says will go up with gambling now more widespread.
→ Nancy Pelosi isn’t the only one doing an about-face in D.C. Now the IRS is walking back its planned rollout of a new facial recognition software for this year’s tax season, after civil liberties groups and lawmakers from both parties raised concerns over how the software could be an invasion and potential abuse of personal privacy. The facial recognition software from a company called ID.me was going to be part of a new identity-verification system for certain essential IRS functions, with the potential rollout of the system to the rest of the federal agency’s tax-processing operation. With few regulations in place to ensure the software company and system itself wouldn’t risk the privacy of users, several lawmakers, including Ron Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, made a joint effort to thwart the software use. “The government can treat Americans with respect and dignity while protecting against fraud and identity theft,” Sen. Wyden wrote earlier this week ahead of the IRS announcement that it would pause the facial recognition software.
→ In a new statement, the Justice Department said it is now evaluating potentially “appropriate guardrails” for safe injection sites—or spaces where drug users can use substances under legal supervision—which leaves open the possibility that such sites may soon be permitted across the United States. The Justice Department’s new approach to injection sites marks a major policy shift from the Trump administration, which aggressively opposed their implementation. For drug users, the sites can reduce the risk of a fatal overdose, as in New York City, where workers at two recently opened sites have intervened in more than 125 overdoses. Moving drug users out of public spaces like streets and parks and into supervised locations enhances the safety for both the users and the general public, supporters say, pointing to Canada and several European nations where the sites have existed for decades. Tensions have emerged in cities and towns between advocates and residents, with those who live close to potential injection sites opposed to spaces they worry will encourage drug users to come to their neighborhoods.
→ Meta’s tough talk on European rules against Facebook and Instagram’s acquisition of user data that the parent company could sell to advertisers seems to have made matters worse for Mark Zuckerberg, after top administration officials said they’d be more than happy if Meta took their products out of their respective nations. “I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook,” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said earlier this week at a press conference in Paris with his German counterpart, Robert Habeck. Pending data privacy regulation from the European Union could potentially cause significant disruptions to Meta’s operations on the continent, Meta said this week in its annual report, forcing the tech giant to remove “a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe.” The prospect of Europe with less social media was fine by Habeck: “I’ve lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years, and life has been fantastic.”
→ At a Kentucky army base this past weekend, officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the military’s R&D arm, oversaw the first-ever autonomous flight of a Black Hawk helicopter, marking a new era in military weapons operations. The helicopter’s 30-minute flight without a human pilot on board included traversing a simulated obstacle run through a landscape designed like downtown New York City, with “the aircraft [avoiding] potential buildings in real time,” Igor Cherepinsky, a member of the project team, told reporters after the flight. DARPA has scheduled additional testing of the automated helicopters later this year, with plans to pass the technology to the Army by September. DARPA officials also said the Air Force is investigating the potential application of the technology for its F-16 aircraft in the battlefield.
→ Stat of the day: Analysts at Moody’s have crunched the numbers on the fastest-rising rate of inflation in 40 years, with a new report today that found the average cost to Americans will be $276 every month, as prices for everything from food to gas and clothes continue to climb. That average figure, though, isn’t being felt the same way across all income levels. For middle-class households, inflation will have a greater impact on their monthly expenses, while high-income Americans will see a less significant effect on their recreational and fine-dining activities.
→ Despite growing evidence that voters on the whole do not support the campaign, and a belief within her own Democratic Party that the slogan has led to confusion and resentment across the base, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush told reporters yesterday that she will continue to advocate for “Defending the Police,” even after her own colleagues have asked her not to. Rep. Bush argued that it’s not the slogan that is alienating voters but rather the party’s inability to get its agenda passed. The Build Back Better bill sits stalled in Congress, and negotiations over the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act collapsed late last year. Despite these failures, many Democrats believe the party is suffering a messaging war. In the wake of the 2020 elections, when Democrats lost 13 seats in the House, leaked audio emerged in which Rep. Abigail Spanberger said the party’s use of “Defund the Police” and “socialism” was to blame. “We need to not ever use the the word socialist or socialism ever again,” she said, and cautioned that the use of such slogans would see the party “fucking torn apart in 2022.”
→ While the 20th century saw the rise of American print magazines as a distinct creative domain that served as both a mirror and expressive outlet for the culture at large, print magazines in this century have largely become relics with only a tenuous connection to that vibrant past, with each year marking a further decline in their relevance and influence on the zeitgeist. See, for example, the news this week that Barry Diller’s media umbrella, IAC, will shut down the print circulation of six magazine titles that were part of IAC’s earlier acquisition of Meredith Corporation’s magazine portfolio. The conversion of the print editions of Entertainment Weekly and other titles into online-only brands is the only way the magazines can survive, Neil Vogel, head of the Meredith Group, wrote in a letter to staff yesterday. “We have said from the beginning, buying Meredith was about buying brands, not magazines or websites.” Not that printed magazines can’t be of use to others. The once-iconic business magazine Forbes announced today that it’s the beneficiary of a $200 million investment from Binance, a cryptocurrency platform. “[As] the crypto market comes of age, we know that media is an essential element to build widespread consumer understanding and education,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder, said today with surprising candor about what he hopes the money could do in positively shaping public perceptions of blockchain currencies, adding that he looks forward to improving Forbes as it evolves “into a next-level investment insights platform.”
→ Poet, rabbi, essayist, and now podcaster Zohar Atkins is out with the debut episode of his new program, “Meditations with Zohar,” a podcast that ventures across the spectrum of interesting ideas and topics of the day. His first guest is economist Tyler Cowen, and they chop it up about the effects of the internet on society, the risks of routine, and the philosophy of Leo Strauss.
Hear more: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meditations-with-zohar/id1608391571
Tablet music writer David Grossman on a new album from Confess
It’s become commonplace these days for multimillionaires to complain in front of sold-out audiences about being canceled and then for people to spend days and days dissecting what was done and not done in the name of artistic freedom, after which everyone moves on. Anyone interested in learning what cancel culture actually looks like should hear the stories of Nikan “Siyanor” Khosravi and Arash “Chemical” Ilkhani, two Iranian expats who now live in Norway and make some of the heaviest, angriest music you’ve ever heard as members of the band Confess.
Speaking to The Guardian, they compare their new album, Revenge at All Costs, to some of the angriest records of all time, like 2Pac’s All Eyez on Me. But their beef isn’t with one particular person; it’s with the Iranian government. The album’s first track, “Based on a True Story … ” lets sampled news reports begin to tell the story. But when the album’s second track, “EVIN,” takes over, it’s hard not to feel an otherworldly rage.
For those who know Iran, Evin is a prison notorious for its use of solitary confinement. It’s where Khosravi, who does growling vocals, guitars, and bass, and Ilkhani, who does the sampling, were thrown in 2015, charged with blasphemy and propaganda against the state. Khosravi described the experience vividly in The Guardian: “There’s no clock in your room. There’s no mirror. You’re basically taken out of society.”
The music is so extreme, so pounding, that it radically alters a listener’s headspace. This is why the genre can blend frictionlessly into fantasy and mythology …
But the best way to understand the saga of the two musicians is by listening. “EVIN” starts with heavier than heavy guitars smashing into a rhythm, forcing order out of chaos. “Waking up in jail / Morgue of living, living inside the whale’s belly / Hope to get out on bail / I’m following my tail, Interrogator says I’ll get hanged fairly.” Khosravi’s voice, all-consuming and throat-grabbing, assures the listener of this absurdity.
Be it thrash or death, one of the main experiences metal music offers listeners is transcendence from their current space into a world with heightened stakes. The music is so extreme, so pounding, that it radically alters a listener’s headspace. This is why the genre can blend frictionlessly into fantasy and mythology, as Confess does on “Phoenix Rises.” Evoking the mythical phoenix allows Khosravi to declare himself an enemy of the state: “I’m alive! You can’t deny me! This is war, it’s on!” he growls as Slayer-esque riffs back him up. Being reborn isn’t pretty.
The album is filled with absolute headbangers, like the single “Megalodon,” in which Khosravi sings in praise of the ancient shark. “Meg is alive, will never die ... He’ll refresh the oceans of hate with your blood!” But even following along on the helpfully provided lyrics, a listener might not understand everything being said. This is part of the metal experience—feeling is more truthful than articulation. While the intricacies of the megalodon’s journey may be lost, Khosravi’s feeling is unmissable. He welcomes ancient power, modern power, anything that can destroy.
“When I moved to Norway … they [the Iranian government] got fucking upset,” Khosravi told The Guardian. “They were like, ‘OK, your six years are turning into 12-and-a-half years and 74 lashes.’ What the fuck? It’s the 21st century—74 lashes?!”
It’s a ludicrous, fascistic response to art, and Confess has produced the appropriate musical response. The album’s last track, “I Speak Hate,” discusses freedom in the rawest sense, untamed and unbowed. “We are smoke without the fire! Heretics with denial! Master of fate, not disciples!” It’s an album of repression and freedom, one that belongs next to books The Gulag Archipelago and I Am Malala. But be warned—it’s much, much louder.
David Grossman is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn and is on Twitter at @davidgross_man
Might Cori Bush be advocating dxefunding the police" rather than "defending" them?